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YaY Let's Burn The House Down - NOT

Over the past few days, we've had Aventures in Borked Electrical Systems.

It started last Friday night with something shorting and making the lights blink on and off, rapidly. I could hear the furnace blower trying to start, so I went into the hall and pushed the thermostat all the way down. The blower started, but there was no heat. It behaved itself the rest of the weekend.

Come Monday, Rico came out and found out the main breaker where the electrical comes in was damaged and needed to be replaced. That meant contacting the electrical company and getting the tether ring on the meter unlocked, so he could remove it, and turn off the electric while replacing the breaker. That took place on Tuesday, and we thought things were fine.

Then more shenanigans happened Wednesday morning. Not three hours after I laid down, Michael was waking me up and telling me about things like power surges and big "pops". I got up, and I could smell electrical burning in the hallway. I immediately went outside and turned the main breaker off, then called Rico.

Rico, Alfons and others spent pretty much the entire day rebuilding the circuit breaker box, replacing the jumper between the halves of this house, and other bits and pieces.

We had electrical casualties. The LED on the stove is out. The fuse is blown on the microwave, and on my main surge suppress strip. My alarm clock is fried, and so is my speaker system, which obviously took a hit before the suppressor's fuse blew. Our router is dead.

Thank all the gods that things like the computers were protected by surge suppression or we'd really be hurting units.

The park is talking about reimbursing us for things like the microwave, provided they can't just replace a fuse. Turns out the previous owners of this house dicked around with the electrical system, adding extra wires and whatnot, and obviously did not have a professional electrician do the work. Every breaker in the box had been loose and therefore weren't functioning as they should. Of course, none of us had any idea of this till the electric was actually used - and freaked out.

I'm on headphones for now till I can afford to replace the subwoofer, which is the heart of my sound system. I found a couple of them on Ebay so maybe next month my Solstice present will be a used subwoofer haha. I also found some listings for the entire speaker system itself, at a much lower price than retail, so it shouldn't be hard to replace, even if the subwoofer I found gets sold.

I am very glad I am renting this house - that makes the park liable for any damages done by the faulty electrical system.

UPDATE: A few hours after writing this entry, the lights went out AGAIN. And again there were surges, so we had to throw the main breaker. Rico came out and verified that there were surges. He messed around with things and what happened? The outdoor light in front, which hasn't worked since we moved in, decided to come on. When I tried to turn it off, there were sparks and surges.

He took the fixture down and discovered it was a DIY job and what had they done? They'd screwed both wires TO the mounting plate. He removed it completely, then had to do a minor repair to the main ground coming in, and now things are fine.

Hopefully that's the worst of it. I'm still unplugging my computer when I go to bed, just in case.

He brought the dead surge strip back to show us the damage done. From the looks of it, the surge overwhelmed it and that's the "pop" Michael heard. I think the plug for my subwoofer was nearest to the damage; that would explain how it got hit before anything else did. The wires inside were burnt to a crisp up to where they hooked into the series of sockets.

Makes me wonder if that generated significantly higher electric bills because we were pulling in extra power that was simply being wasted due to the short.